Let the trauma dumping commence (it gets much worse than the following)...

Everything was black and white absolutism in my family, wrong and right, right vs. left. I was so fearful of hell that I would say "barely" and "hardly" and "i think" after every sentence, so trepidatious of telling a lie, was I...

I think.

I developed OCD-like tics that would come and go, such as counting on my fingers..counting the letters in words..counting the spaces to the left and right of the word, above and below, and dead center.

I blinked hard..I made snorting sounds..washed my hands a lot...etc..

I will never forget the day my mom smirked, and did every tic in the order and pattern in which I did it, staring right at me, mocking me.

All the while, to my mind, she was responsible for them. They were a set among many coping mechanisms I had to develop to survive her.